with being here today, and i'll share it with you. the first was at a home in university park, not far from here at college park, and i was there with our lieutenant governor, anthony brown, and we were looking at some investments that the state and the federal government made through stimulus funding to improve energy efficiency of older homes, and there was a crew of four men working on this home to improve its energy efficiency, and they had this little hand held device that was a device used to move around the ceilings in the walls to detect hot spots. it's used now throughout the entire energy efficiency industry to do that to improve -- to look at where it is that homes can possibly save on their energy costs. the family in that home, an

older family, had been in that home for a very long time and was spending a lot of money on heating and cooling costs in the home, and so they became part of this program that the state is offering that is supported by the federal government, and this crew is in there, and they've been in this business for about 20 years, but the business has only really started to ramp up over these last couple of years, and so the technician who was in the home was going around the home slashing the device at the ceiling and the walls, and you could see on the screen the hot spots as they lit up on that screen to say where the incullation was needed replaced. they were using that and then were replacing the insulation. i asked about the device, and the other people in the room, too, none of us -- maybe me only

with any connection whatsoever to nasa, turns out the device is used throughout that growing industry, that green economy was developed at a lab in princeton in partnership with nasa, and i think you heard from the panelists earlier that we have examples like this all throughout this country and around the world, and we have to tell those stories. now, today i'm a politician, but before, long before that, i spent an amazing six years or so with lockheed before the merger, so that dates me a little bit at goddard space flight center working on the space flight. i was a space baby who grew up watching that black and white screen in the classroom and those early missions, and i was hooked then, and my experience working at the space flight center with so many really

amazing talented people who were really thinking about the future hooked me forever, and not because as a long term career and certainly not now that i would end up in the space program, but because it allowed me to see the tremendous benefits that investments in technology, innovation, and exploration pay off every single day. i had another experience just two days ago out in columbia, maryland, talking with a economy that is an amazing biotechnology company, and they -- they have developed over the course of about 18 years, the ability to grow algae so that it's used in so many of the products that we use that are commercially variable on the market that improves health outcomes, and they started out as part of the fbir program connected with

goddard space flight center and nasa. they spun off -- they are a megamillion dollar corporation now doing some of the most amazing innovative work around. their beginnings, their origins were in the space program, and i think as a member of congress, and i heard the questions earlier, our challenge is to make sure that all of us know that, all of us know those benefits, all of us -- each of us knows my experience of driving in my car and unfortunately being in a hosht accident and having the air bag pop out on to me that has made my back crazy, but saved my life and to know that that is nasa technology. here we are in this unbelievable budget environment where rightly so the mission and the vision of nasa and all who work throughout the industry, and when i say nasa, i just don't mean the

government agency. ii mean the spire sec to -- entire sector from academia, private partners, to the agency itself. we're in an environment of constrained budget, and i know i hear all the time from my colleagues and even people in the community, well, if we need to cut spending, let's cut nasa. well, all of us know, and this, again, goes to the question of the choir, but all of us know we could do that ten days and a sunday and still not make a real didn't in the federal budget, and the last thing that we need to do as we're approaching this new century, we're a decade into that, and we have decades to go, and who we will be for our future, who we will be as americans and as a world is so dependent on having robust investments in our space program, and i would urge us to

sing that message outside of the doors as you've said of the churches and worship centers to sing that message because it really will define who we are for this century, and so i am not just an excited proponent of our space program and the exploration and the science and all of the technology because of the work that is going and the importance of the work itself, but i'm excited because i know that it's a key to us developing our future, economic, and other success here and around the world, and i think it's important for the rest of us to get that message. we will only be as good and strong as our investments in technology, and the core of those investments is the work that we do at nasa. i want to share with you a last story, and it is the story of

every year i go on a family camping trip, 4th of july, all of our extended family and friends pitch tents on the beaches and just enjoy the few days. i was with a group of young kids because my young kid is not so young anymore, so he won't just lie on the beach with me and look at the stars, but i was with this group of young children, and, you know, they ranged in age from about 4 years old to, you know, about 11. we spread our blankets out on the beach in a clear night sky, clear as can be, spread out, looking at the sky, and the kids were so fascinated by the stars and planets, and they wanted to be there. you know what? i felt like i was about 4 or 5 years old because i wanted to be there too.

laurie, i may have to tackle you on that mission to mars. i think we really do have an opportunity to inspire a new generation of science leaders. we really do, and you go -- it doesn't matter -- you go to any school, any elementary school, any high school, and you can see it when that conversation happens, and i know that all of us who make a point, and we should make a point no matter what it is that you do. going out to the schools and your local communities and just talking with the young people about what it is that you do and why you're so inspired, and dr. braun, they will get your passion because i felt your passion sitting over here, and i know that our young people will, and they will take on that challenge, and then leave it to us, but not to us alone to make sure nasa has the resources that match the vision and the mission. that's always been the

challenge, to bring the resources close to the mark where that mission and vision is, and i know that we can do it. just a couple of months ago when i turned 53, my birthday present was a day flying an f-16. you know, i only made the 5g mark, so the next time i go, and, you know, i didn't hurl or anything like that -- that was a major goal, but as we were, you know, going up and into the loop, i just said, oh my gosh, i just want to go further, and i know that this next generation wants to do that same thing, and all of the things that we do here on earth that actually help to build for that kind of technology, and then all the things we do way out there gives us ideas about how to better understand our universe and better understand our planet. this is our future, and so i

just appreciate being able to share a few words with you this morning and know that you have this member of congress fighting for our space program and all that it holds, but there are others too, and we need more, and so thank you very much. it's exciting to be here. i looked through the panels cede, and i thought i wanted to stay for the entire day, and then i look at my blackberry, and they say that's impossible, but it's better for me to know you're here and will be out there. thank you very much. [applause] blpg >> next, we'll hear from

fema administrator, craig fugate. he spoke about fema's whole community program reaching out for help in preparing for and responding to large scale disasters. this is just over an hour. [inaudible conversations] [laughter] >> okay. i'm going to be very brief here. we are privileged to have with us today add min straiter craig fugate who heads the fema

organization. he's held this position since may of 2009, brought to the job a wealth of relevance experience having served as eight years of the directer of the forward division of emergency management, and i should observe that during his tenure, it was the first statewide emergency management program in the nation to receive full accreditation from the emergency management accreditation program, emap, so kudos to administrator fugate, but hegan as a volunteer firefighter and served as an emergency paramedic and then a lieutenant in a county fire rescue team. he's served in a wealth of relevant positions and brings a great deal of experience, and i think you'll find him quite interesting.

[applause] >> good afternoon. for the purposes of this presentation, we are live, taped, or whoever they are doing it. that's why i have three mics on me. i'll try to cover all of that. i was asked to talk about whole community, and this ising if fema is talking about like it's brand new, and people ask what it means. we keep hearing about that. what's it involve? what are they doing different? it's not really mysterious. actually, i think what happened is my staff was tired of using my talking points in explaning stuff, so they called it whole of community for shorthand. i refer to it as emergency management. the whole community is actually based upon two things. one is when we respond to disasters, who are we serving? who is the team? there's a couple observations that i started making as i was

looking at my job in florida particularly in the aftermath of hurricane app drew. i was not with the state, but the county at the time, and i came to the state in 1997, and like in fema, i'm living the gaff math of katrina. you handle tornadoes, floods, wildfires, most states impacted in areas as well as supporting response to international disasters like haiti. you still haven't done a katrina, so we're not sure you fixed anything. we lived in the shadow of hurricane andrew, and that shadow was how to improve that, how to deal with challenges particularly when you have a state that's very prone to hurricanes, and one of the things we thought we learned after hurricane andrew was there was initial reports, and this is one of the things i learned when someone tells you in the first 15 minutes after something big

happened, we seemed like we dodged a bullet, run. [laughter] i heard this twice with hurricanes. i heard we dodged a bullet with hurricane an drug abuse because they were not getting 9-1-1 calls of significance. they got calls out -- calls of power out and trees down, but in the absence of calls for help, it's not that bad. instead of the reason you're not getting calls for help is the power lines, phone lines, the 9-1-1 center, had just been erased. heard that hurricane katrina, remember the initial reports from downtown was we looked like we dodged a bullet, but that was because the water was still coming in. we thought we learned in hurricane andrew the key to knowing how bad it is is doing a

quick assessment. you need teams in that. we need rapt impact assessment teams. we got subject matter experts, go in, get a snapshot of a community impacts, the infrastructure, various lifelines, get experfects from utilities, health, transportation, and get them there quickly on national guard helicopters, fly them over the areas, get them on the ground, they are going to meet with the counterparts, write this up, send it back up to the states so they can agent on it. well, the only thing i ever found that was rapid about this was the amount of time it took us to say we're going to do it because from that point forward, it lost all essence of being rarpd. everimented somebody on the team of the you had about eight team subject matter experts to get somewhere, match up with the helicopters, fly in, and by the time they landed, linged up with people doing the disaster and asked them about their systems,

formally reporting and getting up was about 7 # hours -- 72 hours. okay. the problem was at about 72 hours, you make decisions bouts what you're going to send, and that fills in another 24-48 hours. we get there about the same time frame we got there in andrew in the first place, about five days too late. i said, well, maybe if we make the teams smaller, focused in on a much quicker response, and what was interesting was i kept finding ourselves, no matter what we did, we were getting things on the ground effective no earlier than about 72 hours from the time an event occurred. again, this is with a hurricane. you can see it coming. it took us really about 72 hours to get critical mass to start to see stablization, and so i asked a different question. i said instead of trying to figure out how bad it is, let's

define what the outcome is we want to change. i started looking at the things and looking at disasters a little bit differently. we often talked about responding, but nobody says what exactly are we doing and how much time will it take to get that done? as i did this, i started di secting these disasters looking at international, a variety of things, earthquake response, those type events and the hurricanes. you know, there's a standard process to get to. first, reestablish communication. people think that's electronic. i was thinking logistically. if you cannot physically get to the location, you cannot bring anything from the outside to change that outcome. you have to be able to get in there, and you would think in most cases you can just drive in, but as we saw in hurricane ivan when you lose the i-10 bridge, you have to be able to get to the area. reestablish communication. the other thing i found was safety and security.

there's a tendency to wait or reluctance to use national guard and law enforcement until there's a security issues a sense of lawlessness. talking to social scientists, you do more good by getting people there quickly reassuring people they are not by themselves and showing them people can get from the outside. i call this -- this is one of the things the former tag of former -- the mission, be sure you're safe and secure. i never carried a gun in my career of public safety, so when shots are fired, what's the team going to do if they are not carrying guns? they stop. it doesn't even take an actual situation. it just takes the perception that it may be dangerous, and you just shut down almost out of your non-law enforcement disaster. safety and security. third is rescue.

again, our teams would get there 72 hours later. the reality is when you look at most earthquakes and other types of events of large scale structural damage, what's the survivor number look like after 24 hours? 48 hours? 72 hours? is it a stable population or decreasing rapidly. for the injured, the sweet spot is 24 hours. if you are going to change the outcome for the injured, you have to get there quick enough to intervene to the seriously injury the. after 24 hours there's population who are trapped or they will make it without you. the ones you could have made a difference for, that decision's been done. that's a time factor. you don't get it back. then start getting the initial supplies and commodities in there. that 72 hours it takes to figure out how bad it was, was the time

frame we needed all of that stuff there, so it -- we kind of like gotted to the assessments to know how bad it is to respond, but the time it takes to do that eats up the time to change the outcome. i propose something a lot of folks on my team thought was radical. let's do away with the assessment. how do you know how bad it is? i said, we won't. if i have a major hurricane impacting an area of population, respond against what the potential impact's going to be in and adjust downward if it's not that bad. they said there's a lot of risk and waste and everything else. yeah, i've never seen a disaster go well when there's not enough stuff there fast enough. if you get there, can overrealm it and stabilize it, you buy time, and a lot of times you don't have to order as much stuff, and you can phase out quicker. getting to the point of stablization towards the community i'm not saying is

better, but you stop the loss. it's a key element in how we were approaching and literally responding to hurricanes, and in 2004 to give you an idea of the fun we were having, we had a little tropical storm hit by charlie did in consequence. hurricane andrew can charlie hit august 13th and then 11 days later hurricane ivan hit, nine days later, hurricane jane hit. in all situations, we were able to get that response stabilized and free up resources to go to the next disaster. if we used the assessments, ordering resources, and getting there, we would have had overlap where we could not have moved to the emergency phase for the next disaster while we were basically main taping a steady state to get into recovery. i thought i had figured this out. i'm going, okay, this is good. we can make this work. the next year you had a series of hurricanes, most people

forget, we started with hurricane dennis in florida, a category iii in july, an indicator it's an interesting year. one of the earliest major land falling hurricanes in florida's history, but it was a relatively compact storm. we responded like in 2004, great success, stabilized, moved into recovery. we thought we had it figured out, and then came katrina. what you don't know is not only is there katrina with rita behind it, you sucked all the resources out of the system. there was virtually at the point where this hurricane sitting off the yiewk tan peninsula, wilma which got to a barematic pressure lower than katrina moves to florida. the country is focused now on the katrina response with a lot of resources committed there. i'm looking at a fairly substantial hurricane coming to

florida which fortunately weakens, but it didn't weaken enough. we go into our response. we got a category ii hitting the west coast exiting to the east coast. you assume the worst damage is on the west coast. and least damage is on the east coast. she did not read that book. it did not weaken significantly and there was greater impacts on the east coast because she took power out from 6 million people, bulk living on the east coast from miami up to palm beach county. again, we responded based upon the potential impacts, sent supplies in, set up distributions, got things on the ground within 24 hours, had distribution going from west coast to east coast down to miami into the florida keys. the problem was we did not have all the distributions up in the first 24 hours. again, we had waited more

heavily on the west coast than the east coast, and we got slammed because of our poor response of not having enough supplies out to everybody in the first 24 hours after the tropical force winds exited the coast. this is where i learned another part, it's the building blocks of the whole community. that was we had up to hurricane andrew learned that the volunteers and organizations have to be part of the team. we can want run with, you know, different organizations, salvation army, red cross, everybody doing a response and us doing ours. we have to work as a team. learn how to deal with the unaffiliated volunteers and donated items. we learned those lessons after hurricane andrew and built a good team to do that. we had not build a good team with the private sector, and based upon previous history, particularly in early 2004, the assumption was if the power was out, retail was down. well, one of the things, again

being government, and this is the trap, we were government centric. we looked at a problem and looked at how government would solve it as if we had the total ownership and had to figure everything out. we had been responding to these hurricanes that had been just bad enough that a government centric approach was getting the job done, but when wilma hits, it's a much larger area. we put out as much product in about three weeks for hurricane will ma as three of the hurricanes in 2004. it just didn't have the damages you saw with charlie, but the impacts was a larger area with a denser population. again, the assumption that the private sector is not up and running, we started getting reports up that did not jive with that. they said, wait a minute, there are stores open. how is that? there's no power. they had generators. when did they start doing that?

about halfway through the 2004 hurricane season, except we were not paying attention. in an area from miami to browward to palm beach county, we did a phone survey calling big box stores where we knew power was out and only five were not open. governor bush, who i was working for at the time, governor jeb bush, he likes to remind me of this because he was meeting with the constituents because of the wait of line to get food and water in the distribution which we located in areas that were central to the communities we were serving with good road access and networks and had good parking. it's also where they build the grocery stores, and we were in the parking lot handing oillet free food and ice. he recounts this, but he'll say they are eating fast food, just

bought grocery in the parking lot of which we hand out supplies. think we can do a better job coordinating next time? [laughter] this really kind of threw me for a loop because up until this point, we had been so focused on what government was going to do. pretty much the asongs was in disasters with volunteers and organizations like that. government was going to have to pretty much do everything, take care of everybody, but we were kind of arrogant in making the assumption that if one minute before disaster happens, most of the goods and services provided to the community is done by the private sector and not the government, why one minute after it, we can suddenly be able to do all of this. we sat down with the retail sector initially. that was the initial focus, and we asked a question, and the question was -- you may have heard this -- why don't we just contract with the folks that get it? they got all the warehouses, the supplies, why not just give them

the job to hand all of this stuff out? turns out with a small fee to have that much slack in their system and, tray capacity, they would be interested. they operate in a system that doesn't have a lot of slack. they don't have the capacity to absorb demand beyond which they are doing for their own stores, and unless we're going to up vest in that, they could move some stuff in small disasters, but the reality was they could not do the things we were doing. ..

>> that's the point of distribution for their communities. look at when they are not at. start picking up things like inner cities and areas around lake okajobi. what they don't have, the walmarts, lowe's, home depots, they had the small ipas that got flattened. they stepped back and said perhaps this is a model that we need to look at. how do we work at a partner? you hear the thing, private/public partnership. i want to be part of the team.

i want to be operational that i know where the stores are at and their status. i want e tells me when you have stores coming online to shut things down and do my distribution more targeted to those individuals that need -- that aren't going to be able to come to that store. so when i came to fema, i brought that philosophy. i said first of all, we've got to figure out how to bring the retail sector in as part of the team. you know, if you are in a government, there's 100 reasons why people say you can't do something. that's cheerfully ignorant. i don't care. we are going to do it. we've worked to bring in the folks. we now have representatives on a rotating basis through a consortium of companies that have a position dedicated to the fema national response center on a full-time basis that represents the private sector in coordination on a daily basis, not just when we are activated. the goal here is, again, looking at the private sector as part of

the team. not competing with them and asking them more simple questions sometimes. how can i get you open? what can i do to support that? and again as fema, i don't have as much control that local and state. but i can set the tone, being a bully pulpit, and through the federal coordinating, i can work issues back to the state to help open up lines of communication to help get things done. my team started getting it. it wasn't going to be government centric. we can embrace them as part of the team. that's three pieces. the fourth piece had started out one we tend to call them victims, and i kept talking to social sciences. here's the problem with calling people victims, it is that in helping people deal with trauma, you got to empower them and give them control. loss of control, loss of the ability to make decisions often times exacerbates.

and sometimes words do have power. i had adopted back in florida, the term survivor, not victim. i said one the things i realized when we were doing catastrophic planning in florida, if we took -- i like to use historical events. a lot of people will go you are getting to be too many -- much like a novelist. what if it happened today? we'll take the great miami hurricane, 1926. we over lay that and use all of the predictable models and say what does this look like? some of the research from dr. chris lansky looked at this. he and a couple of other folked looked at the numbers. you know, this is about $120 to $150 billion hurricane. it impacts the swams from miami all the way through to tampa and

makes another land fall. population impact up to $8 million. housing losses almost five times what hurricane andrew took out. much bigger than katrina, as far as total areas, impact, dollar, everything that you look at. as we are doing the catastrophic planning, we're looking at all of the government resources, all the way up to including dod, what we could bring there, all of the ngos and even the private sector. and we were running it against these timelines of how to get the areas stabilized in the first 72 hours. the answer was quite frankly, it cannot be done. i said look, you cannot redefine success to meet what you are capable of doing. you have to really look at this. what are you going to do differently. as you kept going through this, i just kind of hit me. what about the people living there? and the answer was, well, they are all victims?

i'm like, guys, i've been to a lot of disasters. this tendency for people to portray that everybody is shell shocked, sitting around and not doing anything is -- it doesn't happen. people start trying to help each other. people will start doing things. and i run into this -- it's kind of the bias actually, that we look at the public as a liability. we never right that. we tend to look at public's liabilities, they are going to do bad things. i can remember one the big things after hurricane andrew was to concern about people that were just starting to cook. small groups, you know, setting up community kitchens and stuff and feeding people. the big fear they weren't licensed. [laughter] >> and the fear was, well, you are going to get food born illnesses and outbreaked. i haven't seen anybody that died in hurricane andrew of food poisoning.

i asked a different question. i get the idea that we are concerned about sanitation. i know we are really concerned about food borne disease and the kind of outbreaks. it could be devastating. would it make more sense to give them quick instructions about hey if you have bleach or how to do sanitation, versus says don't do this? i kind of figure if it's really that bad, do you really have the luxury of telling the public to stay on the sidelines and not help. but there's a real challenger, because a lot of people -- the first thing they came up with was the liability. you know, the other issue that come up, they are not trained. we have developed this idea that we are all going to be credential, red carded, ics, and everybody is going to have chips on them to come in and wave and go on to the scene and everybody knows who you are. again if that's true, i'm still waiting for that to get sold to somebody. the reality is every disaster is a come as you are. it's really bad. you don't really get the luxury

of saying what you'll choose to use and not use. it'll be what it is. so i started changing how we looked at the public. i said, look, we don't say this, but we tend to take a parental approach to the public. we tend to think we're going to have to tell them what to do, how to do it, and make all of these decisions for them. we get antsies about anything that suggests the public goes beyond that, not wait for that, or take matters into their own hands. we're going to have to get past that. most recently the tornadoes, as much as we give the credit to the first responder, who was actually doing the first rescues in joplin? the neighbors crawling out of the debris, going over to the next rubble, searching for their neighbors. that is time and time again.

it's not unique. it's what people do. i think maybe we ought to change our messaging, being prepared, take care of your family. just added one little thing. once you and your family are safe, check on your neighbor. i think during the heat waves, we again, you saw this message going out from red cross and other local officials. you know, check on your neighbors. you may save a life. if you go back about three or four years ago, you weren't going to see or hear that. i think we are starting to see more and more recognizing that we got engaged to public as part of the team. my evolution from emergency macer has gone full circle. we have to do everything, scale up, and have all of the answers to recognizing that a finite capability. value tiers -- volunteers of those that organize and train, they emerge, you got to be able to bring them in. the private sector in particularly, and that's a bobbing process.

as you start getting in the different sectors. they interdependent sis you see, the ability to focus on, you know, if you are the subject matter on this, it's always fun. we regulate a lot of stuff. since fema doesn't regulate, they will talk to me. they bring in the parent agencies, they shut up. but they'll talk to us. how do we go through and really look at getting critical lifeline and services online that are essentially nongovernmental whether they are vesturer or some kind of utility base or other things up and running? and do that in such a way that we speed the recovery process. but the private sector, as i speak, is starting to realize something else. they cannot plan aton -- autonomously from government. no matter how well they plan, if the community plans fails, they may not be successful either. and this is something, you know, we talk to them about things

like is your community really going to be able to deal with housing, get schools open? get basic public services up and running? because if they fail, i don't know if your plan is going to cover that. how many could keep your employees if schools won't open for months? and they have school aged kids. they are looking -- it maybe six months before schools reopen and i have marketable skills i can take somewhere else. what if the law enforcement isn't up and running. you still got debris, people can't read. so that greater dependency. this is the revolution that we have gone through to get to the what we call the whole community. it's not saying government is telling everybody you are on your own. but it's really recognizing that each part of this team has rolls and responsibilities. and you need to move away from a government centric approach and recognize there are other solutions, other models, other capabilities out there, particularly when they are doing

it every day in the community. but they often times know as much about us as how we operate as how they do. so this has been part of our effort to bring them together. now the flipside, which goes back to being prepared, this is what i get feedback. we do sound parental, we talk about being prepared. that is the reason that you are telling us to be prepared in reality, we are all on our own. you are not going to get to us. nobody is going to get to us. we got to take care of ourselves. it's all smoke and mirrors. that would be the cynic approach. let me be more pragmatic. if everybody in this room who lives in the d.c. area, if something happened here like one of these fluke storms comes up and is a little bit powerful and hits the area and power gets knocked out and you lose everything and you don't have water pressure to get water, we start sets up supplies and

commodities to go get them. have you ever asked yourself if you weren't ready and had the supplies who you are competing with when you go get them? this is where i try to really focus on there's a shared responsibility in being prepared for disasters. it's not about your on your own. it's about everybody needs to understand that you need to prepare to the best of your abilities. because when we don't -- those of us that can't and should and have the financial means and the resources, when we show up to get our supplies, who do we just cut in line in front of? those parts of our community that are more vulnerable, had the least amount of resources and are the greatest risk. for a lot of people, this is not something that's comfortable to hear. they are saying i pay my taxes. why can't i get the supplies? you know, we don't respond to disasters in a format that everybody is inequal and everybody gets what they want. it's based upon need.

part of this is trying to get people to understand in a disaster, the more that we have individually prepared ourselves and families, a) the less resources we have to ship in and focus on the most vulnerable, but get the services up and start moving towards recovery. when we talk about preparedness too often, it sounds like this. you need to have a plan. you need to have your supplies for 72 hours. thank you very much. you are done. it never really tells people why it's so critical. why they are going to be members of the community that won't have the resources, won't have the ability to get ready, and are just trying to get through day to day. that when we do bring supplies in, shouldn't have to compete with the rest of us. and the reality is the faster response in almost any crisis is neighbor helping neighbor. and again we've kind of gotten away from that. we talked too much about what government is going to do, and i think part of this is being honest with people saying, yeah, you are right.

the fastest response in joplin was not the fire department. it was neighbors helping neighbors. the fire department got their quickly, they brought in resources and got to the injuries. within 24 hours, they had gotten the primary search done. they still found people several days later. but the bulk of the rescues were done in the first 24 hours. a lot of the credit goes to neighbors helping neighbors, people literally going in and applying the skillsets they have. so that is that. then one last piece. in our planning we had overly identified what we were going to do based upon planning for what i call a generic population. now if we were doing a good job for that generic population, then why is it every time that we have a big disaster, we identify a group that was marginalized and didn't meet

their need and write an annex. in my time frame of doing this, we have written annex for elderly, people with disabilities, annexes for people that have pets, we were about to write annexes for people that had children. [laughter] >> and i started asking myself a question, how much of the population is this? well, you are up to half of the population has pets, up to 20- 1/4 percent that have children, up to 10% maybe elderly, expect in pinellas, where it's about 80%. it was like, wait a minute, we're planning for easy. we're planning for the people that should have been prepared and not need everything that we are bringing. and it really hit me. i stepped back and my guy says, you know, mark shriver of the

commission of childrens of disasters, save the children, i was there about two weeks. he says we got to address the childrens issue. you got to write the annex. because you are not getting the needs met. impotent children don't need this. that is our typical response. let me ask you a question, mark? wouldn't it make more sense if we used children, people don't use that, the people that need the greatest help, instead of marginalizing and put them in an annex. he was questioning that. i'm not sure you are going to have the focus. kids are not small adults. needs and dietary issues are different. if we put them in an annex, you are going to write that and everybody is going to think it has been done. trust me, it won't be part of the core process.

it will be an after thought. i gave mark the example. i said here's the problem. write an annex about impotent children. if i get a request for state meals, and need meals for a million people, what will i ship them? i'm going to ship them a million shelf stable meals. or if i'm really desperate, get with the defense, and ship in mres. all right, as a grandfather, my two-year-old still cannot gnaw through an mre. unless the state specified we were sending supplies to first responders, if they are asking me for meals, i'm going to go resource the stuff that we've always done, shelf stable meals, meals ready to eat. what good does that do to infants and children? we don't put baby formula, infant formula, if i write an

annex, you think that's going to fix it? we have to change the culture. the whole community says we have to plan for real and not easy. if we are feeding the general population, you got to go from the infant through the ensure. brand names, you get the point. what goes in and comes out, diapers and adult diapers, you are going to need bottles and disposable baby goods, you are going to need bassinets and bathtubs. if you are sheltering, people may show up with that need a wheelchair. our solution was to bring all of shelter for their needs, but not general population because they were special. but the disability community said first of all, we don't like the term special needs. one. two, the american with disability act kind of frowns upon what you are doing, we realize you are well intended by

clueless. they said, why can't we just be part of the community and be integrated in and you look at the functional needs instead of making us special or the services under the disability that does not say does not apply in disasters. this for emergency managers is tough. when you are looking at what we had been writing for a number of years, we were writing for people that drove or had access to mass transit, high school or better education, english is the primary language, had financial resources, had insurance. not exactly the most vulnerable folks in the room. that's who we were planning for. we put everybody in the too hard to do in an annex. and so we taken our planning guidance. i said, mope of -- nope. that approach is failing. and it fails every time. we're going to start planning for the communities that we live

in, not the community that is fit our plan. we know that we're going to have to address these issues in the response. so let us address them in our preparedness and our exercises, how we train and staff and equip. we now maintain infant and baby supplies and our recovery and staging areas for logistics. we are going to look at instead of just having special needs shelters, we are working to have functional access, where people aren't turned away because they may have a disability instead of something else. how do you incorporate all of issues in the planning phase and bring the folks together that day to day work with these various communities. and work as a team. i got a pushback, this is too hard, unfunded mandate, unrealistic to do this for population. how many people heard of joplin

before the tornadoes hit it? not exactly disaster central. more known for route 66 than anything else. but i went to joplin and i was there pretty quick. the president said he wanted me there quick. i got there the night after it hit. i'm there about my second day, i get over to the red cross shelter, this is a red cross shelter. there was no special needs. people where in there on oxygen, wheelchairs, medical attention, they within the being turned away. had public health nurses for crisis counseling and basis medical services and screening. they had infants and children with supplies that were being cared for by baptists setting up activities to distract while the parents were registers for fema assistance who were there. you had the wireless companies that got smart and figured out

not only to bring in charters. when they lose everything, they didn't have the phone or chargers. one the local casinos got all of the chargers and donated them. you had pets being sheltered the on the same campus, but not with the people, but on site. when people showed up, you had an option, house there, or stay with your pet, they had areas to stay with your pet. how did this happen? they took all of the challenges that people said are too hard to do and said who does this every day? we're going to meet and plan if we ever have to open up the shelter how we are going to work as a team and bring all of the resources together. a couple weeks after the meeting, they got to practice it. when people tell me this is too hard to do, i look at joplin saying they did it. they did it in the one the worst situations that you can, a tornado that gave you barely any warning and destroyed key areas.

killed hundreds and took out and destroyed one the major medical facilities for the region. yet, institute of all -- inspite of all of that, they operated a shelter, not what was easy to make them fit our plans. fema is trying to embrace the whole community, trying to build speed, trying to be forward leaning, forward thinking, i tell my guys when something big happens, think big, go big, go fast, be smart about it. people said we don't have assessments and know how bad it is. by the time you know, you lose the ability to change the outcome. people say that's wasteful. you are going to spend all of the money. trust me. if you don't plan, you don't response that way, you get behind, it's going to be far more costly in those situations. we don't do this on every disaster. when we have, it's been because we cannot get enough information to say it's not bad.

so we are going to respond like it's bad. we're going to change the outcome. we're not going to do it as just fema. we have got to bring and get people through the table to get the full team in there. that's a fundamental whole community. people think this is all brand new. actually, this is pretty much emergency management. but it was really forcing ourselves to recognize that emergency management just isn't what government does. it's how do you bring in the whole team? the real goal is we lose fewer lives, get to the injury, stabilize and restore communities in a rapid manner. it all tends to be set in the first couple of days of response. total cost to the community, total cost of using taxpayers. our goal is to speed up the response, but not limited to

solve the problems. look at things like the tsunami in japan. that could happen here. events of that scale are in the realm of possibility, not hypothetical. we've had historical events not only have it happened, they are going to happen again. now based on our infrastructure and populations and vulnerabilities as build. with that, that's all i saw. questions? [applause] [applause] >> sir? >> it's interesting to use the mass media as an enabling supporting function instead of being in react mode.

i've read books where the media could come and learn what it took to run a response, and then help them use the instructions to give to the public and whatnot. >> yeah, there's a two edge piece, if you try to get the media to be part, they are going to rebel. look at the media with two things. the primary responsibility is to report the good, bad, and ugly. the other part, they can be great communicators to provide information to the viewers and listeners about what to do. you end up having to understand there's a balance. because just in time is difficult. you built relationships, make yourself able, and you understand the media's role. tomorrow i'll be doing a chat with the hurricane -- the weather channel about hurricane

preparedness. we'll be doing a life chat and typing my answers. you kind of have to build that on the front end. you got to understand if you try to get the media that says you are part of the team, they go wait a minute. we've got to maintain some separation and independence. because we are actually going to be reporting the good, and your bad. and we got to see it as impartial. if you co-op and lose the impartiality, we've lost the focus. what you end up having to understand is the job on the front end. they can also educate and reach the viewers. that comes back to a) do you have the information, do you make yourself available, do you provide formats that are useful, do you work their schedules? how many people see, you know, this is classic. they do the press conference at 5:00? you know, it's like for the tv guys, like you are killing me. can you move it earlier so we can get it, get it up, and book it? unless you are doing it live, if you are going to do it live, can

we book it during our show, instead of doing it when we are not in show? it's stuff like that that a lot of times savvy people get. what works for you? i need to get the message out. i need to -- when would it be best to get something out. what's the best format? and, you know, recognizing that, i'm not trying to do their job for them, i'm not trying to co-op the message, i'm just trying to make my information user friendly to get it out there. the more user friendly i was, the greater they are going to use the information and get it out in a manner which period of time -- which benefits the public. there's a new piece. if the public are survivors and we have to look at them as part of the team, maybe they are not the liability, they are resource. this is something that everybody is kind of, you know, dipping into. but the best information that i've gotten in a lot of these recent disasters has either come from weather channel or other folks on the ground doing social

media or for the public themselves. this is another thing that if we are looking a at the public as a resource, we call this crowd sources. when you look at individual, everybody get weirded out. i ran a 9-1-1 center. do you know how many bad 9-1-1 calls you got? i can't tell you how many times i went and guns were drawn. this idea that only information information is reactionable. you got to build relationships ahead of time. if they think you are starting to co-op, control them, only showing the good news, you are going to lose whatever relationship you have. if it's bad news, you might as well get it out there. because they are going to find out anyway. sir? >> how many relationships does fema have with foreign governments for captures lesson learned experiences, particularly recent incident in japan with fukushima accident to ensure that lesson learned from there are applied to our country

in a similar type of receive -- type of scenario? >> we have a will lot. we have bilateral with new zealand, australia, russia, asia-pacific, including japan, we've had staff go there in the aftermath. we do a lot of that. not everything that happens maybe applicable to us. we always go through the process of, you know, what happened? how did you deal with it? how does it apply to us? what was interesting about the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear power plant which tended to be most of the attention in the u.s.? the loss of the life was the tsunami was the real story as far as the total impact. looking at all of this from the stand point are we planning for things this bad? we are released the strategic plan leading up to that. we didn't know the tsunami was going to occur. if you look at the numbers of

what we need to be planning against, the tsunami in japan actually fits what we were saying were our realistic thresholds for maximum events. in some cases, we find they start validating some of the things. a lot of people say you'll never have something that big. it's not possible. look, i'm not in the business of just the things that we can handle. when something like that happens, what are we going to do as a nation? we look at the lesson learned, validate one the interesting things about the conversation with australia and new zealand. australia has a federal government emergency, and emergency management is similar to the u.s. in that their territories and their local government, their provincial have more authority. when we were talking about the floods that hit them, many of the issues we plan into.

we do have the dialogue. it's ongoing. it is pretty much something that we do invest time in. and again, sometimes it's validating. sometimes it's not relevant, sometimes it's nuggets of stuff that we go this is something that we're going to have to prepare for. >> what about the department of defense? you mention the national guard, role of the national guard and state active duty. what are some of the key areas that you think the department of defense might be able to support you? >> duel status commanders. they passed a law for governorrers. which was appointed for ongoing issues. with a particular focus on one challenges that we've had when we brought in.

if we brought in title ten into a state and all of the structure that is go into the manage and control that response. this from a state perspective has been troublesome that many of the national guard commanders served overseas and title ten with coalition and active duty. when it came back stateside, they were told, you are in state active duty. you cannot be in the legal chain of command. working with paul over at policy and admiral winfield, we introduced the concept that moved through the process of allowing governors to nominate, serving to be dual certified to demand state active and title ten in support that was title ten and bring all of the forces together. this is has been a significant breakthrough. and it's part one of part two.

that is being able to bring in title ten forces into a state and integrate them into the team that's there. but the other piece is something that we face as a nation. i'm sure most of you know this. we cannot reach out which has a time commitment and takes them away from being able to do any other duty. yet many of the combat support as far ass in the state of impact could be faster and more responsive in we had congress giving the authority to provide the presidential call ups could be less than they call up under the current reserve. right now, secretary of homeland security, she can do recervicalups of the cost guard under her own authority.

secretary defense does not. addressing this, the next big goal is to provide for the ability to bring up the reserves in support of disaster response. i think that's going to be one the key issues of bringing the rest of the team on board. because although they are out there, they are difficult to bring in to response in a situation that we face. i any longer term, we've been looking at the tendency. we are talking about search and rescue. when we look, it is designed for the complex structure. when you look at the design, you are going to get suburbia. we need multipliers.

the ten ten si that we get into, we try to tell you what you want us to do, instead of sitting back and going here's the outcome. what do you think would work? we want engineering units. we know that engineers units can move stuff. they would be perfect. they know how to do this. it would be search and rescue. actually came back with the search and rescue. they said that's not what you need. gout to go house by house to the neighbors and do a quick search. you don't need the engineers, you need 11 bravos. it was kind of like don't tell me how to solve the problem, don't me the problem and let me apply the solution. what we are finding, we have we wrote so many mission assignments. instead of trying to tell you how to do it, this is the what we want to get greater flexibility. with kod, this is just as you are.

you don't know who's ability. the ability not to be so focused on the particular type gives greater flexibility. also mission statements and assignments that are broader scope and give the commanders more flexibility in how to apply the tools they have got. i think these are things we are working on. the biggest thing is speeding up the process. again mission assignments, getting them tasked, bringing people in, getting them deployed, it still takes us a long time to move units. that was one the thing that is, yeah, i was really pleased that we were working with northcom and now with admiral winfield with the joint chief. he shares my passion for -- there's a lot of process that we have to speed up to get things going faster. if we are going to change outcomes at 74 -- 72 hours, we need to speed it up. mart of it is making the mission scope more possible and less

based on mission outcome. >> my question is about the whole community concept. can you speak to the future of the private sector preparedness program and how it integrates or fits into the vision of the whole community concept? >> the dhs or private sector? >> dhs fun out of fema national, known as ps pro. >> i'm finding if you want to get the private sector engaged, i want to do something differently. i want to talk about return on investment. i'm taking a different tack. people are focused in on credential and access. and that's great. some of the preparedness. if you want to get to the heart of business, unless they are nonprofit, what is the return on investment? if you can't answer the question, they'll do some stuff as for goodwill, but it won't be a sustainable investment.

what i'm really been pushing is this? a lot of companies would be better off scrapping awful of the plans and all pretense are going to be open and have enough insurance to pay off, and have a profit, they will make more money. what they fail to do, they don't plan for what the community is going to do. if the community is not better, they are better off not reopening. the interest in government ability to response is great as the factor. when i started the business, most everybody in the private sector was business continuity planner. they were more focused on the data, financials, and things like that. you are starting to see titles more and more called emergency managers. so i think the credentialing piece and all that have, that was an empty attempt. i'm passed that, looking at how to integrate the private sock -- sector as part of the team. tear down the walls.

it's worse than church and state. i'm not contracting. i just don't want to compete. one the things we are finding that's useful is to be able to share data across open data systems to give them visibility what they are doing what and we are doing. we are close to several major retailers give us data feeds to map and see store statuses in realtime in a disaster. there's some good start there is. but we are going way past that to really look at how we work and response and support each other in a situation where you are not able to have clear lines. it maybe who's closest to do something to stabilize. >> there are a lot us in the room or on the other side of the camera involved in emergency management. what are the areas in which we can focus, whether it's think

tank or researchers that would help you do your job? gray areas or gaps that folks request lean forward and look at? >> we've put too much instances on hazards and less on the aspects of how people deal with things. there's a lot in my profession -- there's a lot of people that really, you know, the science, engineering, meteorology. we spend time looking at, but never asked the question, how will i fake the public behavior change? we issue a warning if people still die, what happened? because nowhere safe to go? didn't know what to do. this is a big question with joplin and the tornadoes. we often times spend so much time on the science, we forget about the people. this is probably for me the societal aspects of how

population react saying how do you change behavior over the short term and long term. how do you take things that are not the norm. i'll give you some examples. there are two successful chain -- successful campaign. when i was growing up not wearing your seat belt and smokes was the norm. today it's the other way around. when we talk about preparedness, most people if they have flashlight and basic steps is about as good as it gets. but you are pretty much an out lier if you really got ready. how do you change that? what we find, if you try to do in a lot of turns there are impact. bad things happen. it was measurable, demonstrated, and had consequence. since disasters are such a low frequency event, fortunately, it

doesn't fall in that. we need more social sciences and fund social science research which is not hard engineering, hard science, isn't as glamorous, and a lot of people think it's not that relevant. if the populations were trying to work in, we don't get and we went up talking at them. we do things and expect things to occur and they don't. they can't figure out why. i think it's because again. we don't look at research involving social science. if we don't look at how the behavior for individuals and communities work. we don't live on the government structures. people don't live in a city. they live in a neighborhood. people don't identify with government structures.

that's a big area. it tends to get not the funding, not glamorous, that's where if you want to change outcomes and we don't understand and have the ability to provide information in a way to get people to behavior differently to do things to save lives, protect things, doesn't matter how good the forecast or respond. too many people that could have, didn't. and we don't know why. because we don't get it. >> i got the hook. [applause] [applause] >> actually, i'm giving you a grateful way out.

the people would keep you here for another hour. easily. i want to thank you. that was terrific. it is clear you are a national asset. we are delighted to have you. although you may not be delighted by that. >> eventually i get free and go home. >> i thought that in 1995. [laughter] >> we are honored to have you come talk to us today. it was a wonderful presentation, very clear why you are where you are. you bring a wealth of experience and talent. so thank you. >> thanks. thanks, everybody. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> all this month, watch booktv in primetime. tonight beginning at 7 eastern. we are live from politics and prose from washington, d.c. with

author and features editor for the atlantic. >> all this week, we're bringing you a series looking into the fbi.

>> host: all this week on "the washington journal" we've been looking at fbi. on monday, we took a look at court authorized break ins. on tuesday, the fbi role in counterterrorism, and tomorrow we'll turn our attention to cybersecurity threats and fraud, and on friday wrap up with crime lab and forensics. today a discussion on the fbi budget and key program. following the money with david schlendorf, he's the assistance director for resource planning. let's just begin with your title and what you do. what does it mean? >> sure, the resource planning office is essentially the corporate office for the director and senior executive

team. we help with everything from thinking about his strategy, he sets the strategy, but we have the team that personnel to help him track the data to assess how are we doing? people don't think of the fbi as a business. obviously our mission is not to make money. we're here to protect the country. $9 billion budget. we have all of the challenges that a large business has, financial challenges, human resources, training, strategic challenges, and so our job is to help the director get the most. we have groups to help find efficiency, internal consultants that help look, and get the data, director, and senior executive and other teams like corporate director policy. what's permissible, what's not? it provides data. >> host: in the town, talking about debt and deficit, how did your job come back? >> guest: well, the director in his tenure at fbi and tenure since 9/11 has almost tripled in

size. one the things they recognized was bringing in from the outside. the special togethers, the best tools, best use of resources to have more agents on the street. they hired people in like me with backgrounds from outside the fbi to help run the fbi like a business. >> when you say run it more like a business, how do you get rid of inefficiency, waste, and that sort of thing at the fbi? >> sure, for previous 9/11, the fbi had not invested much. the director and senior team made massive investments. when i got to the fbi in 2003, i didn't have internet access in my desk. >> host: that was in 2003? >> guest: 2003. now i want the latest and

greatest as does every fbi employee. that's taken invest wants, bringing people in, updating, training, to better understand how to use. because of the amounts of information out there today is critical that we use information technology to put the pieces together, find the linkages. similarly, things like how we hire people at fbi. do we hire them as quickly as possible. we have an extensive process that only the people with the best interest find the way. finding the process more quickly. >> host: if you are going to go and purchase big technology and make a big ticket item, how do you do it? give us an example? >> guest: i haven't. the fbi is purchasing or building a new case management. today we stillup the system based on trying to mainframe technology. it's older. we want our agents to have more of a internet-based system to make it easy to come in,

understand how the use the system, for paper to -- almost go paperless. to move things around. the fbi goes out, requests proposals from the best venders in the private sector, uses the competitive process to ensure we get the best value for our money. we go out and use the microsoft, oracles, and good -- google to make the best. >> host: how much is the fbi budget? >> guest: it's $8 billion. it's what congress appropriates. there's another $1 billion where people pay for our services. the first is for personnel. that's what we provide. counterterrorism, criminal investigations. >> host: what does that mean? how does that break down? what is the cost for people? benefits, pension, all of that? >> guest: sure, the $4.8 billion is the total fully

loaded cost. of that, about 45% benefits and the 75% is the direct salaries of those personnel. in total, the fbi has 36,000, special agents, 3,000 are intelligence analyst, these are the personnel helping connect the dots, ensuring that we share information with our partners. the remaining are what we call the fbi special. it's everyone from the scientist that work at the fbi laboratory, linguist, the financial personnel professionals that run our back office finances, human resources, training experts, they are all agents over the lifetime. >> host: a lot of talk about debt and deficit. today inside the fbi, looking at how they follow the money, how they prioritize their resources, it's our guest. if you are a republican, dial 202-624-1113, democrats 1111,

independents 0763. get to your phone calls in a minute. let's talk about salary. fbi agent coming in, special agent when they first come in. how much are they making? how does the salary scale work? entering fbi agents, average is about 31. most of them or almost all of them come with nine years or average, highly educated, almost all of them with masters, md, many had doctorates. when they come to the fbi, they start in the general schedule level 10. gs10. that's on average about $52,000 a year. depending on locality, new york versus a small town maybe different. average about $50,000. almost all of the individuals take pay cuts to come join. they've been out in the private sector, consulting companies, media companies, doing much more lucrative jobs, butt mission attracts.

hollywood recruits for us. there's a certain type of individual that grows up dreaming to be in the fbi. we get tens of thousands of applicants. over time they can grow and rise up the general schedule. by the end of the six or seven, they are gs13 which makes about $80,000 to $90,000. certainly not as lucrative, but the mission attracts. we have a huge effort. we go to top universities around the country. people maybe surprised it's rated one the most desirable employees. we are competing with the like was disney, apple, google. >> host: so the technology experts? >> guest: technology experts, we're at the top business schools. people don't expect the fbi to be recruiting at business schools. there's a school. just like we have the best special information, we want to

have the best running our human resources and financial sources. >> host: what do they start out about? >> guest: they art -- they start out about $75,000 to $80,000. we team them up with the head of laboratory, terrorism, head of financial services, they help better think about the strategy, business processes, efficiencies and bring outside thinking. >> host: first call. >> caller: hi, thanks for taking my call. mr. schlendorf, you've talked about the lessons that you've brought from the business world to the fbi. given your time, what lessons from the fbi do you think the business world would do well to learn from? >> guest: good yes. the guy is it's a mission driven. every business needs to find what the mission to get the employees excited and motivated behind. the fbi mission, i think is almost without comparison.

we need to keep it safe, do it all while upholding the american civil liberties, protect the constitutional rights we cherish. the mission allows us to attract the best, pertain them. i think every business should think about what is our mission to get the employees excited about? >> host: i want to look at the fbi 2012 budget request. about $8.1. your budget is around $9 billion. $8 billion in salaries and expenses? >> guest: that's broad. expense is everything. >> host: $81 million in construction. $131.5 million for program enhancement, and 181 new professions. i'm just curious, you know, three intelligence analyst, it seems kind of an odd number for the request. how do you go about asking congress, okay, i need three of these guys and 87 of these guys?

>> guest: it's a very convoluted process. it requires us from working with the office and the white house. three may not have been the initial process, but it's what we came out with. they are going to be the best we can find. we are also asking for more enhancements and looking for efficiencies. if we are save money through the work that we do, we can automate a process that frees up money and fund additional personnel out of the base budget. it's not just the enhancement, but the efficiencies that are looking on as well. the total question about $131 million in enhancements off set by around $70 million. : $131 million in enhancements, those our most -- are our most important programs -- surveillance, tracking terrorists. we think it is a reasonable

budget request. we recognize it is difficult economic times. host: let's go to marty, a democratic caller in louisville, ky. caller: i want to know what requirements there are to become an fbi, that has taken four years in criminal justice, currently he's involved with school, and this summer he is almost finished with a course in international law, but he really has had this goal for so long, but he doesn't seem to know for sure what the requirements are as far as education. >> host: all right. what's it take? >> guest: he's heading down the right path. we need people who are college educated. he's a law school now.

we hire lawyers into the fbi as they help us with the legal side of the business. the fbi is looking for a broad mix of specialties, not only lawyers, business professionals, media background, language skills. there's no one special ingredient to becoming into the fbi. look at fbi.gov, a lot of options for employment are there. there's jobs posted all the time, and so if he's interested in being a special agent, there's applicants up all the time. there's 56 field offices across the country. each with a recruiter. he can reach out to, speak to personally about what he's doing and get tips on what he should do in the future to make himself an applicant for the fbi. >> host: in 2009, more than 100 agents graduated, 2010, 800 agents. it's 20-21 weeks of training, approximately 850 hours of

instruction. must score 85 mg or better on examines and academic venues, national security investigations, evidence, preservation, and collection, real life case exercises, shoot 80% or better, and the trainees fire 135 rounds during that 20 week training and approximately 90 hours of training on tactics, operation, surveillance, undercover, and intelligence. >> how much does it cost to train an agent? >> guest: it's not a significant investment. we want them to have the firearms training, all the legal training, so they go out, understand what are our abilities, what is the -- where is the line brightly so they don't pass the line. a lot of training and intelligence and surveillance, and the training is just the first piece of it. 21 weeks makes you an agent, but out of the academy, you get the experience that are just as important as the hands on

training. it never stops. over the course of a career, you are brought back for in-services, deferent stages of training. if you get a counterterrorism path, you go to another training site for three years, and there's specific training. if they are a criminal agent, they get criminal training. we make sure we develop the next generation of fbi leaders. it's a massive investment in personnel, but the people make the first great, so the investment is critical. >> host: you get tens of thousands of applicants a year to be an fbi special agent. once you accept them, they start training, how many of them, maybe they pass or fail, but they don't continue on in the fbi. i mean, what's the rate? >> guest: well, it's rare, and i think that's because there's so many applicants so we can select the very best and work hard to be sure they get the

instruction, training, the help they need to be successful whether some people with better with firearms immediately and others need enhanced training. the pass rate is high. there's some who just don't make it through for whatever reason. we look to see if there's other opportunities for them outside of becoming a special agent because there's a lot of careers in the fbi. we invested a lot into the individual, we think they are qualified and just don't have the marksmen skills to become an agent. there's a few who don't make it through each year. >> host: independent from florida, go ahead, tom. >> caller: thank you for c-span. your director knows that six trainee orders murdered to get the patriot act back. they are threatening american citizens as they talk to the media, are threatening media personnel and athletes, and he's done nothing. why has he not? >> host: any reaction to what you just heard from that caller? >> guest: yeah, tom, i'm

afraid i don't agree obviously with what you're saying. i can tell you the fbi takes nothing more seriously than protecting the constitutional liberties we all hold dear in this country. i'm on the resource strategy side, i spend a lot of time in meetings with the sides, and each meeting we talk about how to protect civil liberties, uphold the law and work within the law, so i'm afraid the conspiracy theories you ease spouse there, we don't agree with. >> host: the assistant directer for resources planning at the fbi. taking a look at where the money goes. if you have a question how the fbi spends $9 billion budget, how they prioritize their resources, their agents among their 56 field offices. call into the show. here's a tweet from matt smith, and he says this, "can

our guest comment on the break down of men and women in the fbi? are women represented among special agents"? >> guest: we work hard to represent the diversity of the country because we work in communities all across the country for operational reasons and we have to infiltrate the regions and we have to look like the people and speak like the people in those communities. if you include the intelligence analyst and staff employees, we work on it all the time to be sure our special agent ranks, employee ranks represent the diversity of the american society. >> host: 56 field offices, why so many and how much does it cost? >> guest: every major american city has an office. we have a presence to be aware of the threats and be as close to the ability to prevent the threats and crimes. our field offices are large office with resident agencies

and satellite offices. there's almost 370 resident agencies or satellite offices in small towns across the country to be responsive as the threats occur. stimes it's impossible to predict the threats, but we want to get there quickly, integrated in a local community, and the fbi's best weapon of preventing terrorism and crime is being a part of the community and american citizens with their good will and trust is what we rely upon. we want to be a, you know, ac five member of the community so they call us when they see something that doesn't look right or smell right. it's possible to be here in dc and have that trust. >> host: how do you figure out how many agents will be at which field office? >> guest: that's my group thinking about the operational divisions. where's the risk in the country? international terrorism risk, white collar crime risk, organized crime risk, trying to measure the risk across the country in the doe maps, areas of responsibilities or domains

and figure out do you have the right number of people in dallas given the risk in dallas. the models are starting point for discussion. you get the executive round table where they have combined 200 years of experience and the model says we put the resources based on the risk we measure and we start that and decide where we want to move around the country. >> host: here's one who tweets in this, notice there's never a shortage of money for fbi, cia border control, prisons, police force, any citizen suppression tool. how do you go about balancing civil liberties with the need to combat threats out there? >> guest: absolutely. the risk is out there, and it's up to the american people in congress to decide what level of risk we are willing to accept. for $9 billion, we can work a certain amount of operations, cover a certain amount of threats out there. the day after 9/11, we had to shift many resources away from

criminal to national security. we took 2,000 agents to work on national security matters. we are 50/50 now in criminal versus national security side, but there's certain lines of business the fbi exited from or spent less time in like bank robberies. these were given to our partners like the local police to pick up some of the burden. it's a constant balancing act figuring out to do with the limited resources and what's the priorities and what is a threat-driven agency and assess the size and magnitude of the threats and work those where we make the biggest difference and, for example, we don't work. there's no one else to work public corruption. governors of states representatives, and u.s. congress, the fbi is not investigating, there's no one else to investigate. we can make the most impact, and a lot of crime and terrorism is

global today. you can't work global crimes and the fbi focuses on areas where we can make the biggest difference. >> host: republican line, pat, riled. >> caller: good morning. i want to thank him for everything that he and the rest of the fbi does to keep us safe every day. thank you. >> host: going to vivian, democratic line in florida. >> caller: first time caller. thank you for c-span. the caller before me stole my thunder, but thank you, david, for your service, and i also saw an answer to my question how many employees you have in the fbi, so thank you very much. >> guest: i think, you know, it's been a working at the fbi has been a pleasure for me, and i wish every american had the opportunity to understand the great work the fbi does. it doesn't make it into the press, but the men and witch are excited about -- men and women are excited about

keeping the country safe every day. >> host: what the budget before and after 9/11? >> guest: before it was $3 billion, and now it's $9 billion. we almost tripled in a ten year period which is very rapid growth. that's been a challenge. we needed that money to invest in, eliminate threats, but we had to change processes, upgrade our systems and personnel to effectively spend the resources every year. on the personnel side, it's grown by 30% since 9/11. a lot of investment in information technology, the systems needed to upgrade on our desks, but the systems in the back of the data bases to piece to the links between the luminous amount of data we collect today. >> host: what is are metrics for saying we spend money wisely? >> guest: a variety of ways. the chief financial officer and i sit down twice a year and we

play every leader of the dwietion on a card to see there's accountability, wise stewards of the resource, how well they pay their bills on time, a lot of efficiency on one side. on the side, we have a strategy management system, the directer's way of setting out the objectives for what he wants the fbi to accomplish. for every objective, there's a set of measures that define what skees looks like for that objective. if it's training work force, there's a series of metrics on getting the special training to the agents they need. measure how we have done that over time. at the same time, we see measures we're not happy with, a gap, the director has a list of the priority initiatives, there's about 10-11 every year. it would be deployment of new systems, new training programs, new processes, and we work with budgets, milestones, to stay on track at the cost we predicted. >> host: an independent in

west virginia. thank you for waiting. >> caller: yes, good morning. what i'm calling about, i just have a question. i -- my daughter has had her identity stole, and she trying -- it's in another state, and she has tried to get the local police officers to take care of it in our county. our sheriff now is a retired special agent. quite frankly, i wish he would get back to the fbi, but what does it take? she's called the fbi and everything else. what does it take to get them to step in and stop this stuff? >> guest: well, floyd, good question. i'm not the expert in that area, but tomorrow one of my colleagues, shun henry, who talks tomorrow, can speak to these cases. unfortunately, sometimes the fbi has to prioritize, and we have to look at where can we spend the limited resources and make

the biggest impact across the country to protect from terrorism, intelligence, cyberdefense included. shaun can address your question with identity theft, a growing concern for us, but unfortunately, we can't work every case out there. >> host: has that become and area of focus for you as far as money and resource? >> guest: it's a grow r area of resources for us, one of the three areas we asked for enhancements for with the budget even though it's tough economic sides. you see cyber as a growing threat with terrorism, organized crime groups using the internet. >> host: cyberfraud. >> guest: absolutely. shawn can talk about that tomorrow. it's a growing number of resources for us. a thousand just in the cyberprogram, but really that understates the true nature of the threat because the counterintelligence and terrorism work in cyber. >> host: what agent are you

looking for when it comes to cyber threats? >> guest: people who are facile with the technology, computer scientists, people background in the computer industry, people comfortable working with technology because technology pervades everything we do today. we recruit people with special skills, an entire initiative to ensure the agent works other things outside of cyber and having the skills they need to know about over the course of their careers as well. >> host: a democrat in georgia. >> caller: yes, i needed to know if companies and corporations are allowed to lobby y'all, and they said on the interpret security that they're not going to tell the governments they can't steel individual people's data just they can't mess up the corporations or the states. that's basically working on behalf of the corporations, and not for the people. if you're going to tell them if they do something, it's an act of the government, then

temperature them not to, you know, bother the citizens who pays for this. >> host: a response? >> guest: sure. thank you for the question. the first doesn't lobby in the tradition gnat sense of the word. we look across the country what are the biggest threats out there and work against the threats, and we are working with corporate america, academia, corporate america's identity stolen, victims of the cybercrimes we discussed. if we actively engage all the time with partners in academia and private sector, but we don't lobby in the traditional sense of the word. it's really an a-political organization. the fbi has a mission to do. it doesn't matter whether republicans or democrats or independents are in charge. our mission is the same. we have to go to the hill for resources, we try to stay out of the political mind field here in dc. >> host: total employees 35,000, 14,000 agents. does that include contractors?

are there contractors part of the work force? >> guest: the 35,000 is the actual employees. on top of that is officers from state, local, other agencies who worked hand in hand with the fbi. we have cia, nsa ect. who work hand in hand with us. we have contractors. there's people with language skills, obscure language skills we only need on a limited basis, contractors to deploy the critical information technology systems we spoke about earlier. >> host: give us examples of the important information technology systems because that sounds so washington. you know, people sort of get an example to wrap their brain around it. >> guest: we operate human sources. you spoke about with this dave williams, a critical source of information, and we needed a system in information technology system to keep track of all of our human sources who have skills in what areas, what agents work the areas, and have the approval or course of working that source. there's a system to help us

manage the human source population out there and ensure that the agent wants to do something with a source, there's levels of approval, and that system takes it through to the agent, agent boss' boss -- >> host: an informant? you want them to take some other action, you have information technology system set up that shows where this agent got approval and can go on to do x, y, and z? >> guest: absolutely. can they report on counterterrorism? criminal? if they have a skill set, we have a data base to track those things and track our human informants or sources. >> host: greenville, north carolina. >> guest: yes, concerning local law enforcement and there seems to be a lot of overkill and i didn't know if the fbi has influence in terms of stopping

or slowing down the rate of management trains, just regular local police stops where people are approached with their -- officer approaches with the hand on the gun, and you see a lot of cases there where it's become routine. i wonder the civil rights of most of the citizens when their stopped by police officers for routine stops, do you investigate those in cases of abuses of civil rights? >> guest: happy to talk about that. civil rights is the second criminal priority after corruption. we investigate every case of civil rights abuse we get. it's similar to public corruption. if the fbi doesn't investigate it, no one else is there to up vest gait it. we take civil rights extremely importantly, but more broadly to

your earlier question, we really partner closely as poll with the state and local law enforcement community. there's over 7,000 law enforcements over the country, and they have better access into the communities they live and work in because there's more of them than fbi agents. we work with them. they work on our task forces on the counterterrorism and criminal activity. the fbi does a lot of training with state and local law enforcement. we had our national academy in virginia bringing back chiefs of police of major city organizations providing them with a graduate school education in law enforcement, so really investing in the law enforcement community, partnering with the law enforcement community, and sharing intelligence with them is a critical function of the fbi. >> host: margaret on the republican line in jacksonville, florida. >> caller: thank you for taking my call. my grandson garage waited with a degree in construction and engineering. he has interest in police work.

does that degree help him in his efforts if he wanted to get into the fbi? >> guest: margaret, as i said earlier, we look for people with a whole host of backgrounds, construction engineers to medical backgrounds, law backgrounds,ing thing backgrounds, language backgrounds. there's no degree that is not a possibility coming into the fbiment the special agent population, the intelligence operation, there's so many varied backgrounds. there's almost no degree precluding you from applying into the fbi. there's certain backgrounds we are more interest today like the computer backgrounds, but no degree to preclude you from opportunities in the fbi. >> host: ohio, you're next. >> caller: the consumer price index base the on data. with all the increasing white collar crime like financial crime in the last three years, how much rate an average you

include in the crime index? i don't see much white collar crime -- [inaudible] why white collar crime is almost like i would call -- [inaudible] i know they are smarter than some of the fbi people. i know that. that's why they hack and white collar crime is the most difficult just like insider transactions with the fcc. can you comment on that, please? >> guest: i'll comment on what the director said we are trying to become a predictive agency entrying to look at emerging threats, threats we may emerge in the future, and get ahead of the threats. we are trying to detour crime before it happens, stop criminals before the agents are exited. white collar crime no different from the national security side. a lot of work we do detours crimes from happening. >> host: compare and contrast your resources and money and agencies you put on white collar crime versus terrorism. >> guest: we talked earlier

half the agents work national security including terrorism and counterintelligence and half the agents work criminal programs. that's white collar crime to public corruption to organized crime to civil rights violations, and so of the total agents, half working criminal, i don't know the exact numbers are white collar crime, but the schemes are more important, financial institution fraud, underpinning of our economy, there's a increasing number of resources there over the last few years. >> host: do you have experts looking at wall street and what happened with the bernie madoff case? displg absolutely. it was an fbi investigation, we changed the way the hedge fund industry works and the new york field office is the largest and has a lot of resources in new york devoted to terrorism looking at the financial crimes where new york is a center for those things. >> host: ron asking a report

the hundreds of millions stolen from afghanistan into taliban hands, does the fbi watch all this? >> guest: we had agents in afghanistan for years now working with the department of defense and u.s. intelligence community and train afghan police, law enforcement organizations to come up with the standards of the fbi. if we look into allegations of that, that's something the fbi would look into. >> host: harvey, independent in virginia. good morning. >> caller: morning. my question is does the fbi employ any non-college graduates? >> guest: absolutely we do. we have people we hire straight out of the high school in some cases that worked for the fbi years and years joined recently. there's some non-college graduates at the fbi. for many jobs today, special agent, intelligence, forensic experts we need, we're out there competing with the best companies of the private sector, google, apping, microsoft, we

are on college campuses recruits or people with 5-10 years after school. >> host: do informants get paid by the fbi? >> guest: absolutely. they ged paid if the information is valuable. >> host: how much? >> i don't information is preventing a trrgs -- terrorist attack, we invest significantly in informants. we call wires, intercepts of communications, ect., and so the informant piece is critical, get ahead of the threat. we make investments sometimes and characters that people find less than savory. >> host: is it a salary or paid information by information? >> guest: latter. there's no salaried informants, but based on quality of information, they get paid multiple times.

we like long time informants into groups, and if they provide information over time, they are paid over time. >> host: bring in noncitizens of the united states to be informants in this country for the fbi? >> guest: well, not bring in, but there's people living in the country noncitizens that often times have access to groups that we want to target and threats we want to mitigate, so there could be noncitizens as inform manets, certainlily. >> host: what about the witness protection program? >> guest: i'm not positive about that. >> caller: yes, my question is how many agents work for the president like the bushes and cheney, and them, how many people do you have still guarding them as they are out of office? >> guest: the fbi works closely with the partners in secret service, most responsible formal president protection, but if there's a large security

event like an inauguration, g8 summit, we work with our partners and the secret service and depending on the event, we have hups of thousands of agents in that event. >> host: what's the biggest expense? >> guest: personnel. it takes up $4.8 billion. >> host: salaries and benefits? >> guest: exactly. after there there's a structural costs, rent, more than 500 facilities total across the country, rent is significant, utilities. the fixed costs are significant. the area between rent, salary, ect.. we focus on the discretionary costs. >> host: how much in rent? >> guest: i don't have the exact figure. >> host: millions? >> guest: absolutely. >> host: millions to pay in offices. >> guest: absolutely. there's campuses in west virginia as well, criminal information division, state and local law enforcement offices,

56 field officers across the country, 370 satellite offices, and that's interesting because just last year there's a model to look at the offices and see if we need all the resident agencies, are they in the right places, and the directer closed down 12 of these that sounds small, but it starts to rationalize our footprints. there's also i.t. costs, secret networks, security costs, and each one we rationalize saves us money. >> host: what is the difference between a satellite office and field office? >> guest: satellite reports to a field office. they are smaller. new york there's large satellite offices, but they are small offices, two or three agents working in the officer, some as large as several hundred. >> host: located in a building or -- >> guest: a stand alone building or a floor or building an fbi rents. >> host: one last phone call, but before that, what's the least exceptive thing in the

budget? >> guest: the least expensive thing in the fbi's budget? >> host: think about it, and we'll go to michelle, a republican line in lakes, florida. >> caller: hi, i have a question. i have a son in high school expressing interest in being in the fbi. is there any programs, what direction should he follow to try to become an fbi officer, and thank you, i'll hang up and listen. >> guest: sure. check out the fbi website. we run internship programs for individuals, sometimes early as high school, people through years of college work summers in the fbi to get experience in the fbi, give us a chance to assess them. look at the website and pursue a college degree if he wants to be a special agent. many agents have eight to nine years of experience. we hire directly out of college and some out of high school. >> host: thank you very much for being here. >> guest: greta, thanks very

much. >> a live picture on your screen from the politics and prose bookstore here in washington, d.c.. just a moment or two away from a discussion with don peck, a long term look at the corm and cultural impact of the economic recession. live coverage getting underway here now on c-span2. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

>> okay, good evening. we will get started. welcome to politics and prose bookstore. i'm mike, schedule the vermonts here, and i welcome you have evening on behalf of our owners, our new owners, excited to have on board here, and on behalf of the book sealers, so -- book sellers, so welcome to politics and prose, and thank you for being here supporting this bookstore, our event series. if you're new here, it's a bookstore outside of august and september, we do events every night, so you can follow us, our events which include classes and book groups. you can follow us on facebook, twitter, weekly e-mail, or our website, and actually as i mentioned those outlets, it's a good time to tell you to silence

your phones and gadgets as we get started this evening. tonight, we welcome don peck to politics and prose to discuss his new book "pinched" how the great recession narrowed our futures own what we can do about it. don lives here in washington, d.c., and it's a pleasure for us as a bookstore to welcome a local author here, especially for a debut, so we welcome don and c-span booktv audience. thank you for joining us. the format tonight is don will speak at this podium for 25-35 minutes, present the book, tell us why he wrote it, and then we'll open it up, the second half of the hour to you for questions, and what we ask is that you get to our audience microphone here in the center aisle. it is the one microphone we have this evening. i know it's difficult getting there with a crowd this size, bus because we're taping and

keeps the talk audible for those of us here, we'll field questions from that mrch, but we do encourage your questions and input off the q&a, and don will sign books here at this table. his books are for sale at the front of the store. that's how it will go, but, again, we just really want to, again, welcome you and say thank you for being here, and for don peck. don is a national award winning writer in a features editor at the atlantic covering the economy and american society, and actually the september issue of the atlantic, out now and also available here for sale, features a cover story by don, can the middle class be saved? it's an essay adapted from this book, "pinched," and also i'd like to say a quick thank you to the atlantic for their help promoting this event, supporting

don in his work and this particular event, so "pinched" is about the endouring impalgt the great recession has on american life and how social norms have been deeply impacts and will continue to be altered, transformed. work environments, family dynamics, and personal identities have been turned on their heads and will likely stay that way. the scars of the past several years, in other words, will be in the near and distant future. the gap between the wealthy and the rest wydens, and the concentration of wealth further hollows out the middle class. communities suffer from the same risk. some recovered and others are shuttered. our national identity is shifting. with historical context by comparing this recession with collapses of years passed, don reignites the call for reinvention, the new civic duty and public action.

thank you again for joining us, and it is a pleasure to welcome to politics and prose to discuss this book, don peck. [applause] >> thanks, mike, a great introduction. i should just take questions after that. [laughter] i live 10 minutes away from politics and prose, and over the years, i've ben to countless talks. this is my first book an first time on this side of the microphone. it's mildly sur reel for me, but i'll do my best. thank you, all, for coming. i want to talk about how this book came about, so as mikeside, i'm a features editor at the atlantic, and i spend my time trying to find big stories, cover stories, and if you know the atlantic at all, one the assail ient features 1 we write long stories and they are deeply reported, so one of the pleasures and challenges of the job is trying to look for pieces

that won't appear for six or nine months that will feel deeply considered, but also timely and relevant, and i cover the economy, and among other things, and so when we had the initial financial crash in 2008, you know, it just wasn't even possible to predict what the next nine months would look like. as you remember, things were fluid and could not predict next week. by the time spring of 2009 arrived after t.a.r.p. and the first stimulus, the economy stop free falling, market was reboppedding, and all of us breathed a sigh of relief, but i was trying to think ahead to stories for the fall, winter and so i was talking quite a lot to labor economists and economic historians and students of other major financial crashes, and what i found was that really all

of them were sounding the same note. you know, they were saying that we were prematurely breathing a sigh of relief and saying that actually where things had been fluid, the next six months, nine months, 12 months, 24 months more were likely to be quite predictable. the labor market was likely to recover incredibly slowly. the economy likely to take years to mend. then when i started reading histories of other long slumps, deeper into american history and talking to sociologists about them, it was apparent to me that as societies stew in long periods like this one, they change in many, many profound ways. i decided rather than assigning pieces i wanted to start writing about these phenomena and it struck me as important and struck me as important to try to identify them as quickly as

possible for people so that we could understand them and think more intelligently about recovering. well, two years later after two cover stories and now a book, i'm sorry to say that in my opinion, the next year or two or more are still quite predictable, at least if we don't significantly shift our public actions, our public policies. we are not, in my opinion, yet near the end of this period, and if we stay in such a period of weakness for another two or three years or more, i think we'll begin to see many of the social changes that we can see now. we'll see them begin to become much, much more pronounced. so what is pinched? in part, as mike said, it's a history. i look in some detail at the

1970s, the 1930s, 18 # 0s, different -- 1890s, different periods that recall our own and how life changed them and how they got out as well. in part, it's quite a lot of reporting from around the country on different people, different places, different classes because this recession and the recovery such as it's been has been felt very, very differently in different parts of the country by different people, and i think that holds again important lessons for us in thinking about how to recover. in part, it's a generational study. you know, one thing that's clear from past slumps, long slumps is that up and coming generations change profoundly in periods like this one. i spent a lot of time among the milenial generation and those behind them talking about how they were changing and how their political beliefs were changing

and so on. overall, it's kind of an attempt to assess how this period very broadly is changing the places we live, the work we do, our family ties, our marriages, our politics, and for some of us even who we are, so that's kind of what the book sets out to do. in addition, and importantly, it sets out to try to begin to make some recommendations about how we can recover from this period faster and stand the u.s. economy up more strongly for the future. that's a lot of things, and i can't talk about all of them tonight. what i -- we can cover some in q&a. what i'd like to do is talk about -- try to distill things to three main messages from the book with a few illustrations

and then we'll just take some questions, so kind of three messages from the book. one is that periods like this one, slumps that are deep and long, do have enduring consequences. we think about recessions as temporary. jobs go away, come back, housing values go down, come back up, but deep recessions do leave society in some ways permanently changed, not entirely for the worse, but they change generations, change communities, change families in ways that are not quickly or easily reversed, so because of that, because many of the changes that we are now beginning to experience will last decades, many of the most significant consequences of the great recession are still ahead of us. the second main message from the book is this recession has also temporarily accelerated some very deep economic forces that

were already transforming our society. most significantly the hollowing of the middle class and in that sense in some ways it's given us a preview where our society is heading anyway, and who it is leaving behind. understanding that, i think, is critical to thinking about not just how to bring unemployment down, but how to build a stronger society in the decades to come. my final message from the book is that we can recover faster. i think we're seeing a disturbing amount of fatalism right now among many members of media and many members of congress and we should not be fatalistic about this period. there are things to recover faster, but we're just not doing it. i'll provide a little of detail. first, on the enduring consequences of periods like this one. life changes in -- countless and

surprising ways i think during slumps. people sleep more. they date less. they spend more time at home. they drive less. they drive more slowly which tends to reduce traffic fatalities and overall mortality, something that's happened in this recession. skirts famously lengthen, and la diversity gaga not with standing, pop songs are more earnest, complex, romantic, and less sexual. in almost aspect of life, people are more personally conservative. many things i talk about go away as soon as strong growth returns, the economy recovers, but deep slumps leave enduring marks on our families, communities, and the places we live. i talk about all of that in the book. i talk a lot about how suburbs

and other former middle class mekkahs of the u.s., phoenix, tampa, las vegas, are changing profoundly in the wake of this recession. i'll focus how millenials are changing. it's one of the important enduring changes we'll continue to see. when i began reporting for the magazine story that led to pinched, i really expected that young people would bear some of the lightest scars from this recession. they are in the labor market, not a lot of personal responsibilities, so a few bad years, there's a few bad years, but in fact, when you look at history, when you look at the ample scholarly research done on this subject, it's just the opposite. the first few years in the job market are crucial to establishing the career tracks

and life progeek stories of young people, and people who struggle, cohort and generations who struggle early because of a bad economy, get stuck in bad jobs or can't find work at all never fully recover the they not only start out behind, but according to good research by the yale economist, lisa con, 10-20 years later, they have not caught up to where they would have been if they came out in more bowptful times. they get stuck in low prestige jobs and professions, and they cling tightly to their jobs. they don't switch jobs as often which is really how one increases earnings, particularly early in one's career. about two-thirds of lifetime income growth after you factor out inflation usually occurs in the first ten years of a career. as this recession stretches r you know, three or four more years, a lot of people are

losing that opportunity and acquiring a stigma up under achievement that going to be really difficult to shed. now, those economic conditions and that kind of lifetime economic problem is made complex particularly with what to do with the generation. on the eve of the recession, the millenials had the highest self-esteem and highest material exceptions than any other generation at a similar age. this is a generation of people who were told they were special and could do anything they wanted to. the collision of that attitude and outlook with this economy has been painful to watch. you know, when the recession began, a lot of millenials

understandably didn't really realize what was happening to them. many moved back in with their parents after graduation. many had to, but many did it because they thought they could simply wait the recession out. the term fun employment acquired cultural currency among particularly 20-something college graduates. as i report on millenialss, those attitudes are changing. millenials are changing as a result of this period. economically, we are seeing some of the same career conservatism now that lisa con described in past generations. job tenure among millenialss spiked more than other workers.

a recent survey asked whether they would prefer to switch employers or stay with the same employer for their career, and the majority was stay with the same employer for their career. more than that, you know, millenials are beginning to feel -- well, not beginning to feel, but they are -- they're seeing their entire lives really put on hold. you know, i spoke to a young attorney in dc who graduated from law school in 2009, had not found work as a lawyer. after months and months, he was working at barnes & noble and found a job after awhile with the federal government that made use of his law degree. he was living in efficiency with a roommate. his parents were a machinist and a secretary. by the time my dad was 23 years old, he had a house, a wife,

kids, and these things have been pushed back so far for me, you know, i can't even see them. that attitude, i think, has become more and more pervasive with 20-somethings. they feel trapped increasingly i think in perpetchewable adolescence of which they can't escape. when you look at the political beliefs of 20-somethings today, those, too, are changing radically. not radically, but changing significantly. this was already a liberal generation, but what we see in sur vie data now, is 20-somethings are more liberal and more in support of the poor, more cognizant of the role of luck in life, and they are more spectacle that the government can actually be trusted to exe tently carry out good policy. this, too, is not a surprise. it's exactly what's happened to

prior generations who came out in deep slumps in the 1980s, 70s, and before, and those characteristics in the past have then stayed with those cohorts, you know, for decades afterwards. i write about the millenials who moved home and spent extended time with families. there is good news from this. parents and their adult children said at times that they've grown closer. they appreciated spending the time together, but it's been a pretty complex relationship to say the least. [laughter] you know, psychological research shows that while parents are more than willing to give financial support to struggling adult children, they actually prefer to spend their time with children who are already

succeeding, perhaps because it flatters the parents more. when we look -- when we look at japan, which is a very interesting case, 20-somethings began to live at home quite a lot more than they used to beginning in the late 80s and early 90s. just before japan's two decade long slump began. at first, people were doing that by choice. they were rejecting the salary man lifestyle characterized by their parents, and in many ways, i mean, there's criticism at the time, but they were glamourized for doing that, but what we see is as more and more moved home and couldn't move out because the economy was weak for years and years, social attitudes

towards 20-something changed dramatically. the glamour went away, and now they are referred to as parasite singles, and they are blamed widely in japan for low birthrates to low economic growth. i think it will be interesting to watch how social views of millenials change over the next few years and how our attitudes change as realm, again, if we don't recover more quickly. not all the changes underway from millenials are bad. i mean, some are merely transformations. you know, i don't think the political changes, the political views are necessarily that for 20-somethings. i do certainly sense a return to thrift in this generation. you know, we saw a generation of thrift after the depression that

was only undone by the long inflation of the 1970s and the lessons that young boomers drew from that. i think we are likely to see a turning towards generational thrift again after this period, and i think that will stand millenials in good stead. it's interesting to look at adolescence. in the depression, they were shaped differently than 20-somethings. they couldn't be blamed for the economic struggles that their families were having, and at the same time, they were counted on for more during the depression and pampered less, and they became the greatest generation after that, and we're renowned for their ability to postpone gratification, for their firm commitment to family, and generally for a sort of can-do very practice call attitude. the greatest generation had world war ii, a horrific event, but provided an uplift to the

economy at the beginning of their careers, but if we can get out of the period quickly, we may have benefits for people that are currently in their teens. so that's a little pace of one how this period leaves enduring marks op cultures, politics, character of our society will be changed for decades after we fully recover. two is the way this period is accelerating forces that were already underway in society that were changing classes and life in america anyway. let me just ask a question to everyone here. how many people, just raise your hand -- how many people feel personally in your own life, your own career, your own close

social circles, that you are still living in a bad slump? yeah, not too many people. you know, i would say less than one in five people just raised their hands, and that's not surprising because we're in northwest washington, d.c.. [laughter] america's power cities and creative enclaves, the places to which the most highly educated,ing highest potential people flocked before, you know, over the past 20 years have felt this recession much more lightly than most of america. housing values didn't decline as much, rebounded more, wage growth has been remarkably rapid in the last year or so, particularly in places like manhattan. it's a very different environment than characterizes much of the country now. i think in part it explains why

politically we have been less focused on job growth than we really smowb -- should be today. david, an economist at mit looked carefully at the structure of job losses in this recession, and what he found was overwhelmingly the jobs lost on that were what economists called mid-skill jobs. these were jobs in manufacturing, nonmanager work like clerks, administrative assistants that have typically been taken by people with a high school degree, but not a four year college degree. about 60% of the adult population. it's that group of jobs overwhelmingly that disappeared in this recession. jobs throughout the economy should have been growing and with respect, but if you look at high school jobs in management and professional work, there was no net job loss.

the unemployment rate with people of degree is 2% today. look at jobs in security, food preparation, minimum wage jobs are a little bit better. there's been no net loss in those jobs either. all of it has been in the middle, and companies, as a result of the recession and because the recession gave them license to do this, have largely pulled forward on restructuring and offshoring decisions that they otherwise would have taken years to do, and enormous number of people fall out of the middle class. as a result, the job growth we had such as it is tended to be towards the bottom of the economy. economic data are not great here, but it looks like, you know, it's jobs that are at the $15 an hour level and less that have been growing, not jobs in the middle, and i don't think that there's any good reason to believe that many of those

middle skilled jobs are likely to come back unless we do something to change it, and there are no quick fixes in this particular case. i think we're looking at a large chunk the middle class that is going to be working if they can find work at all at much lower wages than they have in the past. this has been called the mancession. three quarters of the pink slips were delivered to men. manufacturing declined, declined a third in total jobs. ..

they have been doing it for years since the recession. in 1967 among men with a high school degree -- degree 97% were working. to a 76% are working. what does that mean? the consequences are more than one might initially supposed. it is not about a checks and bank accounts. family life is changing really significantly in many parts of the country that are characterized by blue collar work and communities where

people overwhelmingly do not have college education. women don't mary men who don't have jobs or are economically insecure but they do have children with them. those children tend to struggle when as usually happens their parents don't stay together. what are we seeing as far as an acceleration of the trends already existing in the u.s.? we are seeing recovery among the rich, continuing concentration of wealth among the top 1%, 10% of society. we are seeing not just the following of the non professional middle class but we are seeing changes to family structure and community character that i fear will change the future of children in those communities and possibly make things much harder to bridge in the future. i have been running on a bit. bit more quickly, i was going to tell a story of one of the many

struggling men that i met -- i won't. so how do we -- just quickly. i met this guy outside reading, pennsylvania. he is a great guy. optimistic guy, caring guy. when he and his wife were still together before he lost his job in the recession, he and she has adopted eight children. the salt of the earth. he loves his job as a construction foreman and worked his life outside at the factory in construction. in his mid 40s, an italian american, didn't know what to do. he struggled in school 20 years in the past. he new retraining efforts were available but he was terrified. he felt he was too old to take these opportunities in the classroom. his whole manner had been shaped

by blue-collar work. they human-resources interviewing coach provided by local church group told him with the style of conversation you are used to you won't get a job that construction. his response he told me was you can kiss my ass. he felt he was a good worker and that was important. in many ways, there are a lot of men who are good guys, they work hard. their work has been devalued. they are being forced into parts of the economy that require different social skills and skill sets but don't know how to react to that. this guy who i call frank in the book, he asked for a pseudonym, got by by reading his favorite trash for year-and-a-half.

he learned the garbage collection schedule for his neighborhood and his town within 30 miles and he would drive his pickup truck through much of the night looking for appliances that he could salvage for scrap sometimes with his children in the cab. not an easy problem to fix and one that we are going to see more and more in society even as the economy recovers. it is a fundamental change in the nature of work that is really harming men, their families and their communities. the last thing i want to talk about before taking questions, the third message of the book and it is important, we can get out of this period more quickly and we can build a more robust society but it is going to take a wide array of actions and we

need to start now. i will mention three things. in the short run the most important problem facing the economy is lack of consumer demand. the housing bubble allowed middle-class consumers whose wages were not going for a decade to feel they were getting ahead by taking on more and more debt and expecting housing to make up the difference. it is going to take at least another couple of years if we look at that level for consumers to finish the leveraging and get back to sustainable debt levels and be able to spend again. when that happens and unemployment is high it is appropriate and necessary for the government to step in and provide support for the economy and direct job growth. we need to worry about the debt in the long run and pass binding measures today to reduce the

debt. once the economy is healthy ego and -- again but it is dead wrong to move toward austerity today. it is something we as citizens need to struggle against. what we should be doing is investing much more in infrastructure which is deteriorating and decayed. it is an investment and we could bring hundreds of thousands of unemployed construction workers and manufacturing workers back into the economy, keep them working. prescribing in the book it is more than simple stimulus. the ways that i think the government can in the short run create jobs, support the economy and help the carry us through this period were consumer demand is still recovering. but that is the most important

thing in the short run and we are just not doing it today. the second thing, and this is really important and much neglected today. in the long run a lot of this story is about technology. it is not just about the kind of innovation that has been eliminating work for american workers. it has been a slowdown throughout the rate of break through innovation. the sort that creates new products and services and whole new industries. i don't have time to get into why that happened but it quite clearly has. it happened at the same time that innovation defused globally so the work we've our borders more quickly. in "pinched" i call for is sort of manhattan project to reiterate -- reinvigorate technological innovation.

part of that involves more investment in scientific advance and r&d. part involves a really different way of thinking about regulation. especially regulation of young industries that have real growth potential and provide the next generation of products and services for americans. the last thing -- set of things i recommend in the book has to do with killing the whole in the middle class. if the government is willing to intelligently and creatively expand support for the economy today and if we start taking measures some of which cost money and some of which don't, to raise the rate of innovation in the economy a lot will go over time and jobs will come back in particular for people with college degrees who are struggling badly today things will get a lot better. it is not clear that things will

get entirely better for people who don't have college degrees. the forces appear quite inexorable. what do we need to do to mitigate these trends? to allow for a good middle-class life for people who don't have a college degree? we should encourage college but only 30% of the population are college graduates. it is growing very slowly. about one percentage point at. college, we need to widen access to it, is simply not the answer over the next decade to the problem facing the middle class. in the book i look to different education models than high school. vocational programs, apprenticeships which research showed do not foreclose secondary opportunities but which do provide young men in

particular who might not go to college a better sense of real careers that are available to them and how they can reach -- i think this is going to be critical. the last thing filling the hole in the middle class is to some extent i do believe the answer to the problems we are seeing today must be political. a lot of formerly middle-class americans will not recover the wages that they had. a lot of jobs that were available will not come back. i think we really need to think about more aggressive subsidization of work for people at the bottom end of the economy. economists on the left and the right have always advocated a social compact with americans who are working. overtime the problem in the u.s. is going to shift from

unemployment itself to the pay that many people are getting. when we are seeing such explosive rates of growth among the wealthy and still good income, some professional middle-class we owe it to ourselves in society, we need to think about more aggressively subsidizing the low-skilled, low income workers and many people are going to need to take who are falling out of the middle class. let me stop there. thank you for your attention for long period of time. [applause] >> we have 20 minutes for questions. >> that was very interesting. i listened to you yesterday on point. talking about the effect of the recession, my question is about the politics that have affected the recession and our response

to it. i graduated from college in 1969. my parents graduated in 1943. so the response this time is so different from the kind of response of people to the depression. roosevelt was not afraid to say that the problem was the bankers and he immediately put in regulation which was popular. in the 60s it was assumed that social security and the progressive income tax and labor unions were the source of our prosperity. this time, when the government went to bail out gm and chrysler the response of people like frank, middle-class workers, why should they get $40 an hour when clio only pays 20. they should be getting 20 like the rest of us. some people -- why should public employees have pensions if we don't have good pensions?

it was exactly the opposite. i wonder why that happened. >> great question. when you look at the depression, it stands out from other long slump in american history and european history as well. i think in part the very depth of that period which was much deeper than what we are in today, did hold society together. the middle class came to identify with the poor more than the rich which is unusual in american history. the iconic images include bankers selling apples on street corners. there was a sense everyone was in it together and getting out of it together. that is not the case today. the image of bankers today do not involve the sale of apple's. the recession has been held -- felt very differently by different people. that has something to do with -- as i mentioned in the talk, part

of what is going on is many of the most influential people in the u.s. and the most influential places in the u.s. feel like the recovery is well advanced. that washington d.c. in a recent gallup poll showed is the most optimistic city in the country as the state and future of the economy. we had this geographic separation in the u.s. that i think has contributed to inattention on the part of many american elites. there's something else that goes on in periods like this typically and that is psychology takes over. what we see again and again in periods like this is people become much more jealous of their status relative to others. they engage in zero some thinking.

politics grow meaner and supports for the poor generally diminishs. a lot of -- among the lot of middle-class people who are unemployed but have seen their housing value decline and career prospects decline, to them a lot of the benefits they see and government programs they see are benefiting people like that. they don't support that. national debt in particular takes on oversized importance again and again in periods like this. in the early 1980s when the debt was smaller than today a large majority of americans were intensely concerned that the debt was going to choke off recovery and reagan didn't listen. in 1936 as the economy was improving but still very bad image or the americans came to believe the federal budget had to be balanced that year. in 1937 the government tried to do that. it cut spending radically and

raised taxes. the stock market crashed. unemployment skyrocketed 90%. it took five years in world war ii to get us out of the depression. in some ways the push toward austerity. the reluctance to do more is understandable today. it is psychological and emotional reaction and has been before but we really need to struggle against it because it is ultimately an emotional reaction leading toward a very bad policy. >> thank you very much for in most compelling discussion. i wanted to address more the situation of professionals. you talk about a lawyer who could not find a job. we are seeing a shrinkage of options for professionals. not the least of this is perfect that in india there are many

college-educated people assuming jobs in engineering and other fills. even the law can be outsourced and some law firms are doing that for the more pedestrian kinds of things. i think we are seeing shrinkage of state governments that are going to continue no matter who the president becomes and governor perry will influence that discussion. in new york city teachers are being laid off in huge numbers. these are good middle-class, maybe middle of middle-class jobs. some of the professional jobs such as engineering can almost be upper-middle-class. i think this effect did not so totally focus on folks who are blue collar workers at heights of the blue-collar pay scale but again the globalization, the fact that engineers in china are turning out in huge numbers. many of these people don't speak

english. there is an international dimension that is not going to go away and with government cutbacks and support for training and other programs the situation is in some ways kind of gawker. interested in your comments. >> you make a lot of good points. it is certainly true especially for college graduates and professionals as well that life is less certain that it used to be. a college degree is no longer protection against job loss. people still have to retrain later in life and we have seen that in this recession. at the same time the unemployment rate for people with professional degrees 2%. for a bachelor's degree it is 4-1/2% and over 9% overall. when you talk about high school graduates and high school dropout you are in the to the teens and 20s.

it is true that life is less certain today and that won't change for just about everyone but it is also true that people with more education have been better insulated than everyone else. in the depression people began to question the value of a college degree quite widely and they were wrong. i think people who are doing that today are also wrong. return on a college degree remains near historic high. there's more competition from overseas but also more demand overseas. this period is about the rise of the middle class. not our middle-class. for people with strong skills and a good education and some ability, there is going to be more competition. there's also more opportunity because markets have expanded so

much. it is not a 1-way street with globalization and particularly for people with strong skills. overtime the benefits will outweigh the costs. >> there was a lot of violent labor unrest in the nineteenth century. you talk about japan but not the unrest in london. what is your sense of what will take to have blood on the streets in america? >> violence is very unpredictable but we do know from history as periods like this have extended we tend to see more incidents of it, more rioting and so forth as you mentioned. the 1890s, end of the nineteenth century was a violent period in the u.s..

we didn't see anything comparable in the depression but we did see a substantial increase in clinchings and mob violence in that era as well. we saw it to some extent in the 70s. what is interesting is even when we recover the reactionary sentiments once they come out of the bottle are not easily stuffed back in. when you look at the 70s the oklahoma city bombing occurred in 1994 -- and the sentiment to visit -- the origins of the ideology of the bomber can be traced to the 70s and things written in the 70s. when the economy was really in bad shape and a lot of white men

were losing faith in the country. i don't know what is going to happen. japan hasn't had a lot of violence. it is hard to predict. i do think we are going to be vulnerable to reaction and extremism much more than we have been in the last decade or two. >> like others i think it was an excellent presentation. a lot of times people of culture can't see the forest for the trees and your pudding a little bit of the forest out there. we heard with earlier questioners there's a bigger force in europe. what we're going to experience as you describe may only be a

prelude to a greater reconfiguration, and i am saying that because we are not geared up institutionally and politically and psychologically. if you put another layer on top of what you are describing that will make it more complex. i just wanted to hear your response to that that this may be an even greater turning point in history than you are describing because we are accelerating. we changed over hundreds and hundreds of years but now we are accelerating to where we are being compressed into a smaller time period was greater stress. >> there's a lot that is changing profoundly in the world and that is accelerating a lot of changes in american life.

and i think we have been politically and prepared for many of the changes that have been occurring for 15 or 20 years and hidden by credit and by the housing bubble. in "pinched" i say the we need to look very broadly at how we need to change our economic and industrial policy and to try laudable policy and our taxation and redistribution system to try to accommodate ourselves to a new world that is likely to change very quickly. the one source of -- not the one source. i hope i have been speaking very broadly. i talk about the rise of the global middle-class. wages in china and india are rising rapidly.

over the course of a couple of decades or more we will begin to seek wage disparities being eliminated and more demand globally. if the u.s. can get out of its own way and continue to increase education, provide a fertile environment for innovation i think the country will be fine. in the long run. my worry is more what is happening to specific classes. >> can you afford the level of pollution you are describing? >> i have a question about job creation. this is partly an outgrowth of what we have seen the last few weeks with the political polarization and what your thoughts are on how we can get

to race situation where we are creating more jobs for these people you are describing. in the face of a very uninformed electorates that has put in place elected officials who are almost taking positions against people -- what we saw the last few weeks was in beating job creation, not helping. one others i'd point it is you made a comment about northwest but my guess is most people in northwest d.c. by example would be in favor of governmental problems to encourage job creation. >> right. it is an intractable problem and i wish i had good answer for you. it is a tough period politically and you are right. political forces today are

pushing against what we need to do. not towards it. i have two answers. one is it is incumbent upon all of us to speak with a loud voice and be politically active when we really believe in things. i kind of feel like to some extent the people who have been loudest and most active are the people who are pushing against government stimulus and job creation. all we can do as citizens is talk about these issues and write and call our elected officials and make us think about it. had don't think that has happened as much on the pro government support has and it has on the anti.

another thing -- and not another thing. even if it does not push the government for a wholesale change in strategy there's a lot we can be doing that doesn't actually cost money. we are not doing it because our officials are not focused on job growth. one example of that, there is a bill before congress called the start up decent act. it was supported by american venture capitalists and what it would do once more or less in grant davies said to any foreign entrepreneur who wanted to settle in the u.s. and have already secured american venture capital funding. there are a large number of highly skilled entrepreneurs who would love to move to the u.s.. they could create jobs immediately. the bill is languishing. it wouldn't cost any money. we are not doing it.

there are a host of measures we could be pursuing without any impact on the deficit. collectively they add up to something and we are not doing it. >> one last quick question. >> putting bad government policies aside for a moment a lot of people who talk about economics talk about this problem seem to believe in something i call business cycle. there are the troughs and pekes and stuff like that. i am wondering whether business cycles are something we are still dealing with. cheaper labor offshore is a phenomenon. if you want to get a job, not a problem in china. that is one solution but we have